| In the year 2001, the Taiwanese government officially enacted a new educational policy of Teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) at Taiwanese elementary schools. Traditionally, the EFL subject was not introduced until junior high school, where EFL was a major subject in both high school and college entrance examinations. Under the pressure of accountability, stemming from students' performance on the entrance examinations, high school EFL teachers in Taiwan mostly “teach to the test.”;Aiming to reform the traditional EFL education, the new policy of teaching EFL at the elementary level adopted the communicative syllabus, which emphasized communicative competence over grammatical competence and fluency over accuracy. Although the goal of the new policy was widely supported by educators and parents, this policy was launched with inadequate preparation and cooperation among educational agencies, and with a lack of communication between policy makers in the office and teachers in the classroom. As a result, the credibility of educational agencies and the effectiveness of this policy were strongly questioned.;This paper aims to argue that policy implementation takes stakeholders, more than the government, to implement educational policy and achieve reform. The nature and result of policy implementation depend on specific local circumstances: school politics, teacher proficiency, or parental involvement. These factors critically affect teaching and learning inside the classroom, and ultimately determine the effectiveness of an educational reform. This paper also illustrates what obstacles local educators encounter in their specific contexts, what negotiations must be made among different interest groups, and how these local factors sway the day-to-day classroom practice of a nationwide educational policy. In sum, this study offers a new perspective on understanding EFL education difficulties that are rooted not only in inadequate preparation of the teacher, but also in factors related to the organizational and cultural structure of the school. |
